The Internet has emerged as a critical communication infrastructure, carrying traffic for a wide range of important applications. For example, Internet services such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Service over Internet Protocol (SoIP) are delivered to customers at any location with an Internet connection. A customer may access VoIP services via a variety of access networks such as cable networks, Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) networks, wireless networks, etc. Cable and DSL provide high speed broadband access on wired connections that limit the mobility of users. As more and more customers are accessing services using mobile end-devices, the wireless broadband access networks are becoming ubiquitous. In addition, in suburban and rural communities without cable or DSL, the cost of extending wired broadband access is impractical. A wireless broadband access network called WiMax is becoming more and more the access network of choice.
WiMax is able to support broadband access while not limiting users to wired connections. However, the bandwidth on WiMax network is shared among users in a given radio sector. If too many subscribers access the shared bandwidth simultaneously, congestion may occur and performance objectives may not be met. The network service provider needs to determine the number of subscribers that can be supported while meeting the performance objectives. The performance objectives depend on the type of traffic. For example, voice traffic is known to have more stringent delay requirement as compared to that of data traffic. Traditionally, the bandwidth requirement to support a pre-determined number of concurrent calls for each sector is determined using an Erlang B model that assume all voice conversations take the same amount of bandwidth. However, the voice traffic from multiple customers may have different bit rate due to the use of different codec technologies.
Therefore, there is a need for a method that allocates bandwidth for a wireless access network.